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Guest Op-Ed : When Drug Prices Mean More than Sick Patients

The Department of Health and
Human Services has a new plan to cut drug spending. But it’s not a change for
the better.

To lower spending in
Medicare Part B — the component of Medicare that covers advanced,
physician-administered medicines — the agency plans to tie U.S. drug prices to
the artificially low prices paid in other countries.

This would harm patients.
Price controls may save the government money in the short term, but they would
slow the rate of medical progress.

In most developed countries,
the government dictates the price of prescription drugs. Governments use this
power to pinch pennies, often at the expense of providing access to the newest
breakthrough medicines.

Creating just a single new
medicine costs an average of $1.7 billion and can take more than a decade. And
only a handful of drugs sell enough to cover their research and development
costs — much less subsidize ongoing research into new medicines.

If the government decides
drug prices, drug developers will have a harder time recouping those
investments — making investment less appealing. Progress towards therapies for
illnesses like Alzheimer’s and cancer would slow. New drug launches would
become rare.

U.S. patients currently have
better access to the newest drugs than any other country. Consider that 89
percent of 290 new drugs released between 2011 and 2018 were available in the
United States at the time of their initial launch. By contrast, German patients
had access to only 62 percent of these medicines.

Delayed access to new drugs
is the unfortunate reality for too many people around the world. If we import
their policies, we will import their diminished access to new drugs as well.

HHS’s reform puts the
financial interests of the federal government before the well-being of actual
patients.

Merrill Matthews is a resident scholar
with the Institute for Policy Innovation in Dallas, Texas. Follow him on
Twitter @MerrillMatthews.